5 Zuzanna Ładyga Winnicott, Levinas and the Ethics of Referential Play in Postmodern Literature To call a literary text postmodern means, among other things, to imply its uneasy nonrepresentational relation to extra-textual reality. Yet, although the complexity of the implication corresponds with the heterogeneous nature of the postmodern label, critics have rarely given it a similar amount of attention. In fact, since the earliest postmodern experiments, they have compartmentalized the issue of these experiments mimetic dimension by referring to it as a play with reality, a self-referential game, and an act of toying with the representational conventions. Due to this terminological tendency critics have completely overlooked the fact that the notion of play is anything but transparent. And anything but innocent. As noted by Gerhard Hoffmann in Philosophy and Fiction in the Postmodern American Novel, play has been used for too long as a self-evident category which perhaps coincides with the broader discursive crisis as regards theorizing postmodern referential methods and it is high time it returns on theoretical agenda. This is how Hoffmann justifies his view: Play is a very elusive and ambiguous term that is hard to define. The spontaneity, naiveté, and creativity of play, its elementary unquestionableness as well as the mixture of reality and irreality in play seem to resist analysis. It is a motion in space, and occurrence in time, a process of thinking and feeling and an idea of the mind. Play [ ] contains in itself as phenomenon, an idea, a linguistic term ambivalence, multi-dimensionality and indefiniteness, and thus refutes the old in Nietzsche s view destructive Western tradition of dualistic thinking. (Hoffmann 1997: 368) It seems, therefore, that with its spatio-temporal indeterminacy the notion of play offers a much richer conceptual perspective for the study of the non-traditional representational techniques in postmodern literature than the critics have been willing to notice. However, the exploration of this perspective will make sense only after the mechanism of play s unquestionableness and multidimensionality has been scrupulously investigated. In recent years, such investigatory efforts have been made possible by the upsurge of critical interest in the work of British ego-psychologist Donald Winnicott and his idea of playing as the core

6 6 ZUZANNA ŁADYGA subjective experience. 1 Interestingly, however, while offering a powerful theoretical tool for analysis of referential play in postmodern literature, Winnicott s theory also brings to view the problem of the ethical aspect of postmodern poetic methods. Therefore, the aim of this essay is to explore the hitherto neglected ethical dimension of play in postmodernism, by reviewing Winnicott s theory from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical ethics. Before the aim is pursued, however, a word on Winnicott s theory of playing. In his most important work, the 1971 Playing and Reality, the British psychologist issues the claim that differentiation processes of the subject occur neither in the subject alone (as Freud would have it) nor entirely outside of it (which is the case in the Lacanian model of the subject), but between the subject and the (m)other, in the intermediary area of experiences called transitional space, where the subject may playfully manipulate objects of external reality 2, and thus determine the boundaries of the latter and establish his/her sense of separateness (Winnicott 1980: 4). Winnicott emphasizes the creative aspect of playing in the process of individuation (1980: 39). When the child plays, his argument goes, it does not communicate anything it already is. Instead, it performs its own becoming (1980: 41, 50). With so much emphasis on the transitional role of playing and its performative character, Winnicott s theory seems, at least initially, to answer Hoffmann s plea for a discourse that accounts for creativity and mixture of reality and irreality in postmodern linguistic and intertextual games. In particular, the theory seems to explain this aspect of playing that Hoffmann calls non-dualist and transgressive. Last but not least, because Winnicott claims that early transitional performances serve as the model for the subject s later creative and artistic activity, his theory opens a theoretical possibility of dealing with the problematics of literary subjectivity and the problematics of referential relation to reality in literary texts all at once. If, as he claims, the process of artistic creation involves manipulating elements of the external cultural reality that an artist inhabits, in a manner determined by his/her pre-subjective transitional experiences of playing (1980: 100), then transitionality is the key to discussing the dynamics of the writer/text/reader relations. For it does seem to fill the conceptual gap in the study of the autobiographical/intertextual/interactive elements of postmodern poetics. The question remains: does Winnicott s theory account for the strong ethical tension involved in postmodern probing of the boundaries between the text and its cultural surrounding? Not entirely. With all its potential for describing the elusive patchwork structure of postmodern literary subjectivities, Winnicott s theory overlooks one of the most prominent features of postmodern poetics, namely, the textualized awareness of the ethical aspect of cultural experience. After all, when Winnicott transplants the affirmative view of violence inherent in primary processes onto the phenomenon of artistic activity, his assertion of an undeniably positive value of using, manipulating, and mutilating external otherness ceases to be innocent and ethically neutral. What Winnicott does 1 See Peter L. Rudnytsky ed. Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces. Literary Uses of D.W. Winnicott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Gabrielle Schwabb, Subjects without Selves (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1994). 2 Although in the transitional experience the subject does not initially recognize the objects as external, it soon acknowledges their otherness from its own self by creatively using them in play and witnessing their resistance to destruction.

7 WINNICOTT, LEVINAS AND THE ETHICS OF REFERENTIAL PLAY 7 not seem to take into account is that creation is always an ethical enterprise, a dynamic interplay between control over reality and readiness to be put into question by its radical otherness. Therefore, vital that a Winnicott-inspired theory of playing or any other approach concerned with art s usage of elements of external reality be supplemented with the question of ethics. A good place to start such a revision is the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher whose ideas correspond in many ways with the those of the British psychologist. Levinas has a lot to say about the role of manipulative violence involved in subjective processes. In fact, his entire model of the subject is founded on the idea that no incursion on the exteriority and alterity of the surrounding world is ethically neutral, and that a usurpatory approach to exteriority obstructs the process of subject formation. According to Levinas, subjectivization is not the process of using reality but the process of being endlessly vulnerable to its otherness, of succumbing to this vulnerability, and of accepting the state of being put into question. At the first glance, the ethical relation to exteriority thus seems to be a complete antithesis of Winnicott s creative manipulation. But if we scrutinize the structure of Levinas s subjectivity model, the violent and usurpatory rapport to reality also has a positive role in the process of subjective becoming. Violent possession of exteriority is a necessary prerequisite of the ethical gesture of the subject to substitute for the Other; one needs to feel the pointlessness of one s egoism to wish for his/her subjectivity to take place as substitution. If so, then we could use the perspective of Levinas to state that the violence inherent in transitional play of a literary text can be understood conversely to its literal message, as troping not so much a violent incursion on a reality under reference but an ethical difficulty of the text s referential impasses and transgressions. It may be that when postmodern narrative strategies oscillate between different levels of referentiality sometimes even creating an illusion of their fiction s return to conventional realistic form they do not aim, as has often been argued, at reiterating the ontological anxiety of their subject constructs. The goal of these strategies is instead to probe the limits of this anxiety in order to problematize the ethics of referentiality, of subjectivity, and perhaps of fiction writing in general. This necessarily brief comparison of Winnicott s and Levinas s understanding of violence demonstrates the benefits of juxtaposing the two thinkers on the topic of referential play. Levinasian thought enables us to rethink the ethical aspect of Winnicott s proposition that literary subjectivities actively perform themselves, in a play of language which is partly a language of their own and partly a conventionalized dialect of their cultural reality. For where Winnicott insists on the active role of the subject in this process of relating to reality, Levinas proposes a more passive view of the latter. In his view, literary subjectivities not so much perform as they are performed by the radical alterity of the Other whose Face comes to undermine rather than to consolidate the illusion of creative control over the real. This divergence between the two thinkers has interesting implications for literary analysis. What a Winnicottian critic would interpret as exterior elements out of which literary subjectivity creates itself, a Levinasian one will see as elements which mark the disappearance of text s ontological unity for the sake of ethical subjective moment. What seems to be at stake in the analysis of postmodern referential play is precisely this textualization of the ethical subject. However, although Levinasian thought offers itself as a tool for theorizing this phenomenon, we cannot apply it without accounting for what Levinas, in contrast

8 8 ZUZANNA ŁADYGA to Winnicott, has to say about the relation between subjectivity and aesthetics. Levinas s general attitude to literature and art is negative, his arguments surprisingly phonocentric, and conclusions self-contradictory. Compared to Winnicott s clear assertion that art as transitional phenomenon encompasses the subject as well as the Other within the fluid spatio-temporal boundaries of its in-betweenness, the Levinasian understanding of the aesthetic, at least at the first glance, seems to be completely dissociated from the notion of subjectivity. The concept of the ethical subject, realized in an equation: Same (being) Other(ethics) = ethical Subject of substitution, locates the aesthetic entirely outside the ethical, in the ontological domain of the Same. This is because Levinas believes that the aesthetic involves representing through images, using figures, signifying, in short, doing all that blocks direct ethical encounter with the Face of the Other. Levinas stresses that alterity cannot be turned into an image, because an image is an allegory of being (1987: 135), while the Other belongs to the realm of the otherwise-than-being. Therefore, representations of the Other always misrepresent him/her. Even the Other s own artworks stop his transcendence mid-way (Levinas 2002: 227). To say that the Face represents the Other would be to treat it as a figure that incessantly betraying its own manifestation, congealing into a plastic form, [and being] adequate to the same alienates the exteriority of the other (2002: 66). In short, the Face of the Other does not signify. Instead, it expresses itself in the immediacy of the beyond signification. Can one get any closer to the Old Testamental dismissal of images and affirmation of immediacy? Levinas s phonocentrism stands in direct opposition to the radicality of his ethical philosophy, and hence there arise contradictions in his discussion of the aesthetic. For example, one of his reasons for art s unethical character is that artistic images mesmerize the audience into passive participation. However, passivity is also one of Levinas s conditions for the ethical experience; ethics cannot happen without my subjection to the performance of the Other in me. Therefore, we might reason against Levinas that by inducing passivity, artworks do nothing less than realize the pattern of the subject s passive receptivity towards the Other. The point is succinctly expressed by Jill Robbins in Altered Reading who notes that in his insistence on art s unethical tendency to force its audience to participate, Levinas himself hints at a similarity between the subject s exteriority to itself in the mode of aesthetic absorption, and the exteriority of the Face of the Other which speaks infinity and which commands me (1999: 89-90). He himself indicates that there is a possibility of a literary discourse becoming ethical. If we follow this indication in a critical approach, our inquiry into the ethical aspect of literary subjectivities will have to focus on tracing the trope of passivity. Its textual manifestation can be conceptualized in parallel terms to Winnicott s suspended temporality of the transitional area of the subject s activity, as materializing in the text in the oscillating levels of referentiality of its intertextual collages. An equally useful indication of the ethical literary discourse stems from the second major contradiction in Levinas s attitude to the aesthetic. As remarked earlier, even though Levinas opposes ethics to art, he frequently alludes to literature to illustrate his ideas. Crucially, the greatest concentration of allusions coincides with Levinas s description of a concept that of all his ideas comes closest to Winnicott s transitional space of an artwork, namely the concept of the there is. The somewhat intermediary character of the there is manifests itself in the fact that it denotes the experience of an overwhelming unavoidability of being, the experience which ushering for the substantiation of the

9 WINNICOTT, LEVINAS AND THE ETHICS OF REFERENTIAL PLAY 9 desire of the pre-subjective Same to escape being becomes the nucleus of the transformation of this Same s egoism into an ethical sensibility. Defined by Levinas for the first time in his 1946 There is: Existence and Existents as the impersonal general being, the there is constitutes the bottom level of his model of the subject s relation to being. It is an anonymous, yet inextinguishable consummation of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness invades, submerges every subject (1989: 30). Like the transitional space, the there is with its all-encompassing murmur annuls the difference between the I and its exterior. Levinas likens it to insomnia, in which one s wakefulness cannot be discerned as coming from the inside or outside. Coming even closer to Winnicott, Levinas indicates the primary character of this event. In one of his interviews he likens the horrible insomnia of the there is to a childhood experience of world s unbearable indifference to oneself: when you were a child and someone tore you away from the life of the adults and put you to bed a bit too early, isolated in the silence, you heard the absurd time in its monotony as if the curtains rustled without moving (2001: 43). The experience of the there is is thus rendered as the anonymously approaching agonizing indifference. The darkness of a sleepless night swallows the I as well as all other things, leaving nevertheless that which cannot disappear, the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously (1989: 31). The there is is, in other words, the event of being s perpetual swarming from which one finds no escape (1989: 31). Levinas differentiates his understanding of being from that of Heidegger, arguing that: the pure nothingness revealed by anxiety in Heidegger s analysis does not constitute the there is. There is horror of being and not anxiety over nothingness, fear of being and not fear for being the condemnation to perpetual reality, to existence with no exits (1989: 34). It is being s being which is one s greatest curse. As something prior to nothingness, a dense presence of the void of absence, it keeps one dissociated from oneself in the state of eternal vigilance to its uninterrupted rustling ( , 32). The impossibility to exit this state is a cause of paralyzing horror (OB 164). How does this horror manifest itself? Levinas never answers this question in philosophical terms. What he resorts to instead is literary examples. The horror of the there is is, for example, Phaedra s discovery of the impossibility of death, the eternal responsibility of her being, in a full universe in which her existence is bound by an unbreakable commitment, an existence no longer in any way private (1989: 34). It is also the experience of Shakespeare s characters: Hamlet recoils before the not to be because he has a foreboding of the return of being In Macbeth, the apparition of Banquo s ghost is also a decisive

10 10 ZUZANNA ŁADYGA experience of the no exit from existence, its phantom return through the fissures through which one has driven it (1989: 33). The dread-effect of the there is is also produced by realist and naturalist novels, where beings and things that collapse into their materiality, are terrifyingly present in their destiny, weight and shape (1989: 32). Levinas names Huysmans, Zola, and Maupassant as examples of authors whose seemingly mimetic writing discloses a materiality of the murmuring background of the there is (1989: 32). Such condensation of literary allusions clearly indicates that Levinas endows the aesthetic with the power to reveal the there is (Robbins 1999: 96). Very much like the transitional space of artistic endeavor, the nocturnal space (Levinas 1989: 31) of the there is serves as the aesthetic middle ground between the I and the exteriority of being that surrounds the I, as an intermediary area where the event of being s density manifests itself and prepares the dissociated from itself subject-to-be for development. But while for Winnicott the connection between the subject and the transitional space is relatively direct (the subject uses the elements contained in the intermediary space-time), Levinas s version of transitionality exhibits greater complexity. The there is does not rescue the subject from its solitude: it is the anonymous level of existence which deepens the solitary condition of the Same. However, by the same token, it also sustains the Same s egoistic affective sensibility without which the potentiality of the ethical sensibility could never come to life. Therefore, to say that art is the there is does not mean that art cannot host the ethical. The aesthetic in which the there is is realized is to be understood as a promise of ethical subjectivity, a promise which is of course temporarily detached from its future realization. What manifests itself here is another parallel between Winnicott s intermediary area which facilitates differentiation due to its suspended temporality, and the there is as the aesthetic sphere whose event prepares the ground, though never partakes of, subjective evolution. Similarly to the transitional space the there is is all about potentiality, about the primary experience of temporal suspension out of which the subject may emerge. That the there is can be understood as another name for the transitional space of literature is confirmed in a footnote to There is: Existence and Existents where Levinas invokes the most notorious of his literary allusions: Maurice Blanchot s Thomas L Obscur [ ] opens with the description of the there is. The presence of absence, the night, the dissolution of the subject in the night, the horror of being, the return of being to the heart of every negative movement, the reality of irreality are there admirably expressed (1989: 36). Apart from seeing the manifestations of the there is in the lives of fictional characters, Levinas seems to think literature can describe and express its immanence. This means that Levinas does not posit any difference between discourses of philosophy and literature (Robbins 1999: 97). In fact, literature is even closer to the task of expressing, i.e. performing, the there is than philosophy because philosophy can only quote literature to describe the there is, and can define it only through constative, rather than performative, utterances (Robbins 1999: 99).

11 WINNICOTT, LEVINAS AND THE ETHICS OF REFERENTIAL PLAY 11 Levinas s use of express, the verb which as we know he associates with the ethical event of the Face, suggests far more than the performative character of the there is. If literature can perform the there is, it may also have the capacity to perform that which an-archically visits and interrupts its incessant murmur, namely, the ethical encounter with the Other. But because literature belongs to the order of the there is, the ethical never signifies in it directly or, should we say, never signifies. It enters it only as a tracing trace of the Other that Levinas calls the Saying, the performative disruption of the ethical that shatters all referential stability of a text. In this way, one might say that the there is does have a creative aspect; it hosts within itself the promise of the hypostatic event of encountering Otherness that is necessary for the subject to emerge. As such, the there is embodies the qualities of play from Hoffmann description quoted in the beginning of this essay. It is characterized by tremendous affective ambivalence as well as by conceptual indefiniteness. It is an experience of a liminal irreality that is paradoxically defined by its elementary unquestionableness. But above all and apart from embodying these features, it situates the phenomenon of referential literary games in the context of ethical questions about the representational capacity of literary language. In conclusion, it seems that the lens of Levinas s concept of the there is enables us to rethink the performative logic of textual transitional spaces, and thus serves as the basis for a postmodern theory of play. The correspondence between the there is and the idea of transitional experience may help critics to conceptualize the ethical aspect of postmodern (self)referential play, to bring out and analyze the tensions of the ontologically structured subject constructs. Bibliography: Hoffmann, G. (1997), Philosophy and Fiction in the Postmodern American Novel, Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, : Levinas, E. (2001), Interview with François Poirié, Is It Righteous to Be: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Jill Robbins, Marcus Coelen, and Thomas Loebel, ed. Jill Robbins, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press: Levinas, E. (2002), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. 16 th printing, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1989), There is: Existence without Existents, The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell: Levinas, E. (2004), Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, 5 th printing, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1987), Reality and Its Shadow, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Kluwer Academic Publisher s Group: Robbins, J. (1999), Altered Reading. Levinas and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rudnytsky, P. L. Ed. (1993), Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces. Literary Uses of D.W. Winnicott, New York: Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Schwab, G. (1994), Subjects without Selves, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1980), Playing and Reality, London: Travistock Publications.

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